Loss of Connection to Nature

In an interview with Jon Thompson in Free Verse, Stewart remarks, "Little could be more devastating to our lives and to the life of poetry than a forgetting or denial of our place in nature." This is one of the themes of the poem. The forest is a symbol of the connection between humans and all of nature. The rich images with which the forest is evoked are presented as something from the past that cannot be recaptured. The speaker realizes that the connection has been lost, and she struggles to reclaim at least a flavor of it through memory and language. However forcefully this is attempted through the medium of poetry, the result is far removed from the original living experience. It is only "a kind of life," something that can only be referred to in quotation marks as "'in the forest,'...